House Cat Hisstory Traced to 5 Mideast Matriarchs

Felines chose domestic life 10,000 years ago
By Colleen Barry,  Newser Staff
Posted Jun 29, 2007 6:04 AM CDT
House Cat Hisstory Traced to 5 Mideast Matriarchs
An Ocelot cat display is seen at the Santa Ana Wildlife Refuge visitor center near Alamo, Texas, Wednesday, May 9, 2007. Wildlife enthusiasts fear this site could be spoiled by the fences and adjacent roads the U.S. government plans to erect along the Mexican border to keep out illegal immigrants and...   (Associated Press)

The origin of 600 million house cats has been traced to five matriarchal lines in the Mideast, where the first wildcats moved close to families some 10,000 years ago and earned their keep eating vermin,  the New York Times reports. House cats share striking DNA similarities with wildcats in Saudi Arabia, Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.

Cats became particularly useful when humans first started raising wheat and barley and needed the bold wildcats who moved into villages to keep down the rat and mice population, scientists speculate. Domestication has proven to be an extremely successful survival strategy for the animals, whose population continues to increase while other cat species are faced with extinction. (More science stories.)

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